CATEGORIES

A more engaged audience yields high ad rates (or student learning)

Last year an Interlude video of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which let viewers flip through a fictional TV wasteland — infomercials, game shows — in which actors mouthed Mr. Dylan’s lyrics, got more than 70 million views. Recently, an interactive video for “Stayin Out All Night“ by the rapper Wiz Khalifa, a Warner artist, was viewed 3.8 million times, while a conventional version on YouTube got only 3.6 million views. “This Interlude technology is game-changing,” Mr. Khalifa said in a statement. “I’m very glad to be at the forefront.” For Warner, as well as for advertisers that have begun to use Interlude, the appeal of the technology lies in how it lures people to be more active viewers. According to Mr. Bloch, the company’s chief executive, 90 percent of Interlude’s music video viewers make choices while watching (videos will play even if a viewer does nothing). A more engaged audience yields higher ad rates,

Well, I haven’t sampled (no pun intended) the technology, but the key point is familiar to anyone who knows anything about how students learn: they have to engage, and the more effort them have to put in to any teaching session the more they will learn. Remember Robert Bjork’s phrase: desirable difficulty, in learning.

reestheskin.so

reestheskin.so is mainly about education and medicine, and how these domains intersect. I think Roger Schank has it spot on when he says: ‘There are only two things wrong with the education system (i) what we teach and (ii) how we teach it'.